InSight mission Options

[Paolo]

the GEMS Discovery finalist has been renamed InSight and now has its own website: http://insight.jpl.nasa.gov/

[djellison]

That's cool - PLUTO was an awesome and cunning little piece of kit.

[SFJCody]

Does seem like a shame that only one copy of this spacecraft will fit into the Discovery cost envelope. A seismometer network would provide some very interesting data.

[JRehling]

Mars Geophysical network options with anywhere from 1 to 4 stations have been studied. This passage seems to say it all:

"Although a network of four or more stations would be ideal, fewer stations could still provide much of the necessary information for addressing the science objectives described above. There are many analysis techniques that have been developed for seismology, particularly in the last decade that could extract interior information from seismic measurements at fewer stations, or even a single station. One seismic station could use techniques such as P-S/back-azimuth tracing to provide locations, multiple phase arrivals (P, S, PmP, PcP, PKP, etc.) to derive interior velocities and boundary depths, receiver function and surface wave analysis to delineate crust and upper mantle structure, and Phobos tide measurements and possibly normal mode observations to constrain core size and state. Two stations constitute a substantial improvement in capability, providing correlation capacity for unambiguous identification of seismic events, an improved ability to compute surface wave phase velocity, and noise correlation techniques that can provide planetary structure from background noise analysis while strengthening the interpretation of the single-station techniques described above. A three-station network has the additional advantage that it could provide event locations using conventional P-wave arrival techniques combined with a limited set of a priori assumptions.

For this study a two-station network of seismometers is considered the minimum network size to address the baseline science of MGN for a New Frontiers class mission. However, single station missions were also investigated, as they would provide science value commensurate with Discovery class missions."

Source: http://ia700504.us.archive.org/26/items/Ma...tions-Final.pdf